Twenty-five years ago today, Symbolics Computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts, registered Symbolics.com as a URL. It was the first such claim in computing history:

That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon.

It took until 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one millionth dotcom was registered.[...]

It is unlikely that the early dotcoms were thought of as businesses as the early internet was not seen as a place for commerce but rather as a platform for governmental and educational bodies to trade ideas.

Scholars generally agree that a turning point was the introduction of the Mosaic web browser by Netscape that brought mainstream consumers on to the web.